PETERCULTER MEDICAL PRACTICE

WE will be saying goodbye to Dr Fiona Jackson in mid-July, wishing her well for her future career and more immediately best wishes to her and her husband for their forthcoming delivery! On 6 August we welcome Dr Caroline Howarth who will be our new GP registrar until July 2004, completing the final phase of general practice training with us. Thanks to all of you who assist in any way with the training! educational work of the practice - it is much appreciated.

For some time, we have been very aware of the unsatisfactory length of time that you may have to wait to get an appointment at the practice for other than emergency treatment. We have been discussing this issue in some detail recently and will be introducing changes to the appointment schedule which we hope will help.

From August the new system will be in operation and may take a little bit of fine-tuning so do please bear with us and let us know what you think (in fact we will also be organising a ‘Patient Satisfaction Survey’). There will be a daily system for getting an appointment to be seen for urgent/emergency reasons the same day, with these surgeries conducted by a ‘duty doctor’, a job which the doctors will do in rotation. Without going into detail, we hope this will vacate more opportunities to see a named doctor of your choice at shorter notice than is possible at present. We shall see!

Hope you all have a good summer.

With best wishes,

Dr Douglas Harris